Study On The Influence Of Attribution Of Unavailable On Purchase Intention In Pre-registration-based Limited Sales Context

Inspired by Apple’s “hunger marketing” practice,Xiaomi’s “pre-registration-based limited sales” promotion strategy has proven a great success in terms of stimulating customer’s attention to its products and boosting sales,and is soon followed and adopted by major domestic mobile phone manufactures.Essentially,“pre-registration-based limited sales” is a promotion strategy based on the positive scarcity effect of out-of-stock products.It enhances customers’ perceived value and purchase intention by creating the illusion that the product is in short supply.However,as customers start to realize the real intention of this business practice,they tend to have certain psychological reactance to it.This paper,therefore,aims to examine customers’ complicated psychological reaction when they encounter an out-of-stock situation during a pre-registration-based limited sales.Based on a literature review on relevant domestic and foreign studies,this research introduces a model that combines attribution theory,perceived scarcity theory and psychological reactance theory to learn both of its positive and negative impact on customer purchase intention.Experimental research method was mainly used in this study and data were collected from college students.Questionnaire modified from sophisticated scales is designed for data collection.Finally,data analysis is conducted by SPSS 17.0 and AMOS17.0.Research results show that:(1)Customers’ attribution of the product stock-out situation varies by the way that the limited supply message is communicated.If customers are informed by the large registered user numbers,they tend to attribute the stock-out situation to massive customer demand(high external demand,non-corporate responsibility).However,if customers are informed by the limited supply quantity,they tend to attribute the stock-out situation to company’s limited supply(low internal supply);(2)Customers’ attribution of stock-out situation has a significant impact on their perceived scarcity and purchase intention.What’s more,perceived scarcity serves as the mediator between the attribution of the high external demand and customer’s purchase intention;(3)Customers’ attribution of stock-out situation has a significant impact on the degree of psychological reactance and their purchase intention.In addition,psychological resistance serves as the mediator between the attribution of low internal supply and customers’ purchase intention.